How to be Healthy Without Dieting ⋆ Earth and Water

I’ve never been good with rules or restrictions. At all. I need pure freedom. So I’ve never done well with dieting. There was this one point in my life where I was only allowed to eat salad but it wasn’t really in my control which is the only reason I stuck to it as well as I did.

Diets don’t work

There are so many things wrong with diets. Let’s name a few:

There are hundreds to choose from. Most of them conflicting.
They’re restrictive and hard to stick to.
They’re stressful and time consuming.
They require lots of thought and calculation
They aren’t satisfying, you STAY hungry
They’re downright depressing
They’re temporary changes for temporary results

Most people who go on diets and successfully lose their target weight, end up gaining it all back plus some. This means that not only do they not work, but they’re counter productive. Why is that?

Dieting is Stressful

Stress has a lot to do with it. Denying yourself the things you want and enjoy is stressful. So is feeling like you’re hungry all of the time. Not knowing what to cook or what to order. Watching your friends and family devour delicious looking pizza and cookies while you stand on the sidelines reminding yourself of the beach vacation coming up. Shaming yourself if you have something that’s not in the guidelines of your diet. The finally ending your diet and over indulging in celebration.

Stress causes weight gain because when you stress, it sends signals to your body that hard times are about or soon to be about. This causes your body to store all it can so that you won’t starve to death.

Starvation has always been the number one cause of death throughout history. This means our bodies are not programmed to turn down food. No matter what we know about it and what it will or may do to us.

Diets are hard to stick to. The mainstream world are definitively not set up to cater to those looking for a healthier alternative. The restriction, leaves it next to impossible to navigate if you’re not use to living that way.

Lifestyle over Dieting

Diets as we know them, have a starting point and an ending date. Eric Meadnes made a really good point. He said that when you think of the diet of animals you think “An elephant eats X amount of grass a day. A Cheeta (I’m paraphrasing) eats X amount of giselle.”

That’s their diet. That’s their lifestyle. How they live. When it comes to humans, diets are something we do temporarily. Which doesn’t really make any sense.

Since they don’t last forever, they are really hard to stick to. We don’t give them a chance to become a part of our lifestyle. We don’t have a chance to get use to them or make them a habit. Which means they are something we dread, avoid and stress over.

Diets don’t work. Lifestyle changes do. Instead of having a start date, make one change at a time. It’s not about avoiding what you can’t have, it’s about eating more of what’s good for you. Eric Meandes said that starvation is still the number one cause of death. But instead of starving because we don’t have enough to eat, we’re starving for vitamins and nutrients because most of what we eat doesn’t have any in it.

There’s more to being healthy than Dieting

What you eat is the foundation of health. You can’t get around that. We are what we eat because food is our fuel. Without this foundation being solid, you’ll have cracks and crumbles in your foundation. I.e. disease, sickness and low energy.

However, we are complex creatures. Simply eating well isn’t going to solve all of our problems. We also need to take care of our mind, our emotions and the essence of who we are. Our mind, body and soul all make up aspects of who we are. If one is off balance, they all will be.

The connection between the three and how to be healthy as a whole is becoming a more popular thought and for that I am very thankful. It pains me to see people with problems that could be so easily fixed. The more people who are aware of how to fix them, the better of a world we can all create for one another.

If you heal your past truamas, you just may heal your need to emotionally eat. Heal your sense of lack and you may find yourself able to control your portion size and stop over eating. Learn to love yourself and you just may find better choices easier to make.

Everything is connected. Bad choices are always linked to a deeper, often emotional source. Mindset is everything and when you begin to heal these aspects that stem from the past then you release negative manifestations they’ve cultivated.

Where to Start

Start small. A 1% change everyday is a 365% change in a year. It doesn’t have to be stressful, forceful or hard. Make one change at a time. Make better decisions as they arise. Focusing more on nutrients than calories. Getting the good in rather than eliminating the bad. You want to crowd out the bad.

When one change becomes a no-thought-needed habit, make another change. Once you start getting use to the changes, start implementing more than one at a time if you like. It’s your game to set the pace to. As long as your making progress, no matter the speed, your winning.

After all, we’re in this for the long hall. We want long lasting changes to our health for the rest of our days. We want to be able to do for ourselves when we’re elderly and stack the cards in our favor. Sticking around for our friends, our loved ones and ourselves is the goal. Not looking good in the bikini. In time, that will come naturally if you’re just taking care of yourself.

Responsibly Stop Denying Yourself

You should definitely never shame yourself. If you want the cookie, eat the cookie. Enjoy every bite as you completely stop doing everything else and focus souly on the texture of it’s chocolate chips. The smell of it’s sweet brown crust. The softness as it crumbles in your mouth.

Don’t deny yourself the pleasures of life. Tomorrow’s never promised. But also don’t eat so many that you feel horrible, can’t breathe and develop diabetes because you could also live to be 100 and you want to be able to take care of yourself and enjoy life then, too. You don’t want a loved one to have to take care of you because you didn’t take care of yourself when you could have. That’s not fair to them and they deserve better.

I have a self paced, online course that helps you with all of this and more. It also comes with a community so that you get all of the help and support you need to start making better self care choices. Aside from how and what to eat, I’ll teach you other aspects of adding to your health such as: